Kingdom Hearts 1 - Where it All Began... - The Game Collection Review!
540When I first played Kingdom Hearts, it became the standard against which I measured Action RPGs. Does it hold up today though? This is where Kingdom hearts all began!
Welcome back to The Game Collection!
Kingdom Hearts 3 is just around the corner, and in an effort to prepare myself for it I've decided to take a trip down memory lane with Kingdom Hearts: The Story so Far. And one-by-one, I'll try to piece together the events of this notoriously complex series. So let's get started where it all began, Kingdom Hearts 1!
Intro
Kingdom Hearts is an action RPG that was originally released on the PlayStation 2 in 2002. The game is unique for its inclusion of major Disney and Square Enix characters, and allowing the player to explore the worlds featured in several Disney animated features, and interact with the stories as they play out.
The game begins with our hero, Sora, spending some time on an island hideout with his friends, Kairi and Riku. The trio are gathering supplies and building a raft upon which they plan to go exploring the world. After preparations are made, everybody goes home for the night. However Sora wakes up to a storm brewing in the middle of the night. Fearing for their raft and supplies, he returns to the island to find that things are worse than he expected. Black beings called Heartless have swarmed the island, and in a whirlwind of strange events surrounding Kairi and Riku, Sora finds himself alone, stranded in another world.
However, in typical Disney movie fashion, it isn't long until Sora bumps into some friendly faces. Donald and Goofy, at the behest of King Mickey, are searching for someone called the Keyblade Master. As luck would have it, Sora has recently discovered that he controls a Keyblade, and the three agree to travel together to different worlds, searching for King Mickey, Sora's Friends, and seal away the creeping darkness using the Keyblade along the way. Or at least that's the basic gist of things.
In order to string together a plethora of independent Disney worlds and Square Enix characters, the writers had to get pretty creative. The plot of the game at times will definitely require the player to willingly suspend their disbelief. But what awaits the player who can muster the courage to let go of their cynicism, is a fun and novel trip through some of the most iconic animated settings ever.
The smaller stories of each of the Disney worlds that you visit throughout the game are like snapshots from small segments of Disney's larger films, and don't retell the entire stories from those movies. Instead, typically when Sora arrives, they'll find ways in which the Heartless are affecting the Disney world, and preventing the stories from playing out correctly. Sora and friends take it upon themselves to team up with the world's protagonist, remove the offending heartless invasion, and allow the story to resolve unhindered by the Heartless.
Because the stories all followed small arcs from the movie scripts as closely as they could, most of what happened within these worlds was pretty predictable after the first few worlds played out. So the smaller stories are rarely going to be the larger draw for the player. Rather, exploring the worlds and fighting along-side your Disney heroes is the cool-factor for the majority of the game. The overarching story of Kingdom hearts though, while a lot more interesting at times, is also a lot harder to follow. It plays out more like a mystery, raising questions while rarely providing answers. And in my opinion, when those answers eventually do start to come, they rarely feel like answers.
Kingdom Hearts as a series falls into the trap of taking itself too seriously for what it is. And that trend started in Kingdom Hearts 1. In order to try to sound deep, the game throws out some pseudo-philosophical word-soup at the player, in what I can only assume is the hope that the player won't try to over-think it. โฆWhich, as a reviewer, is kind of my job. That makes this an incredibly frustrating sticking point for me.
But the story really isn't the reason anyone should be playing Kingdom Hearts. The solid action RPG combat instead, is the meat and potatoes of the game. When I played Kingdom Hearts, upon its original release, I recall the combat being smooth, and intuitive. Playing Kingdom Hearts today though feels a lot slower, and more strategic. It actually felt closer to playing Dark Souls than playing Ys 8. This is at least partially due to the game's emphasis on dodging and parrying attacks, rather than blocking them, and the slower speed of attacks and combos. The other part of this is surely due to the fact that during this play-through, I made some bad choices.
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Kingdom Hearts Statistics For SuperDerek RPGs
At present, SuperDerek RPGs has 22,361 views spread across 3 videos for Kingdom Hearts, with his channel publishing less than an hour of Kingdom Hearts content. This is less than 0.14% of the total video content that SuperDerek RPGs has uploaded to YouTube.